Month: September 2003

Aryntha and Rai came up last night. We did the Thai thing then wandered over to the shop where Rai got to fondle some of the firearms we don’t keep out in the gun cases. We then meandered over to Wally World for camera ram. This is where Aryntha found a fairly nice 1.3MP camera that uses SD memory (eg. It doesn’t suck) for $30.

Once we got back we did the hot tub thing, which was nice as much philosophy is always discussed in the Cannibal Special. We followed this up by sitting in the living room, staring at the fire place and listening to Floyd’s “The Final Cut”. At about 1 am the decision to go and lay siege to the local Denny’s was put on the table so we did so and returned to the house at about 3am.

I have to work a few hours today and Aryntha and Rai might have to run back down the mountain, but there is still opportunity for adventure yet today…

The next time I try to be a nice guy and volunteer for something, someone please hit me…

I just lost 2.5 hours of my life while sitting in the USS Lincoln and having a 40+ year old drunken woman alternately tell me about how her life sucks and how she wants to “keep” me… Eeeek!

Ok, this all started earlier today when Larry called the store at 10:30 and mentioned to me that some vital tax paperwork had to be down at the accountant’s office by this evening.

I told Jack, after having had several birthday parties yesterday, to go ahead and come in around noon so he could sleep it off, and I told Larry I’d drive down to Denver once Jack came in and get everything taken care of. Here’s where the volunteer thing comes in…

I asked Jack once he came in, as I always do, if he needed anything from Denver as I was making the trip anyways… He always says no, but today he did ask me to bring something back for him; a friend of his.

Now I’m not one to turn down a request and Mick, the pro skater from the board shop next door was there and asked if I’d bring back some liquor for him and his wife as it’s a lot cheaper in Denver. I agreed to both requests and after getting a shopping list and an address, off I went.

The trip down was uneventful with the exception of me forgetting that the 5pm rush hour in Denver starts at noon these days. I swung by “Applejack” liquors right off I-70, bought the items on Mick’s shopping list and headed for the accountant’s office. Once the aforementioned papers were safely in the hands of the accountant I headed over to pick up Jack’s friend and that’s when the fun started…

I got to the apartment about 5 minutes before 5 which is when I said I’d be there, knocked on the door and was greeted by a short, fat guy in his underwear who promptly closed the door again. A few moments went by before the person I was there to pick up reopened the door, bags in hand, and we proceeded to the car.

Once on the road I discover that said person is a smoker… A real smoker… We’re talking a half a pack an hour smoker, and she’s in my car which has never had a cigarette anywhere near it. She commences to light up and starts asking me about myself; what kind of hobbies I have, etc. She quickly discovers I’m the ultimate in boring because we have no frame of reference with which to communicate. She’s a television addicted waitress in a downtown bar, who is also a chain smoker, an alcoholic, and a serious motor-mouth while I’m a quiet, anti-TV intellectual who designs networks, writes software, doesn’t smoke, and only drinks stuff that comes from Scotland in $80 bottles.

Well we make it to C-470 before she starts going on about how she “needs a shot” and wants me to stop at the first liquor store I see and buy her a bottle of vodka. I’m also informed that Jack will pay me back… Well, about this time I’m figuring maybe she’ll pass out on the way up the mountain and shut the hell up and don’t really care if Jack pays me back or not.

So it’s back to “Applejack” where she picks up a half liter of cheap vodka ($6.49), I gas up the Lincoln while she ties one on in the passenger seat, and we head for the hills.

At about Idaho Springs, 30 minutes into a 2 hour drive, she’s put away about a quarter liter of cheap vodka and this is when things start to get surrealistic. She starts hitting on me something fierce between bouts of tears in regards to, whom I can only guess, is the guy in the underwear from paragraph 7, and rattling on about everything and everyone she used to do in the Vail valley.

As my speed continued to increase in a vain attempt to shorten the duration of time I was trapped with this woman, she drained the vodka bottle about a third of the way. This occurred as we were going up the east side of Vail pass and is also when she started to get very “touchy”… I *hate* being touched, especially by strange freaky women; makes my skin crawl just thinking about it. Anyways I asked her several times to desist and she finally relented but started with this whole, “I really like you, I’d like to keep you” thing and going on about how she didn’t want to go to Jack’s apartment and would rather spend the night with me.

I nearly stopped the car and dumped her on the roadside right there, but the wise words of Wolf came back to me just then… I told her I had a girlfriend in Denver who would kill me if anything like that happened.

I didn’t get the response I was hoping for as she had apparently heard this one before, so she started asking me about said girlfriend. So, I started to tell her about Wolf; the 5 foot 10 inch ex-Marine Corps Amazon who was very protective of me… I wasn’t lying; Wolf is very protective of me, is a girl, and is a friend. At least that’s how she explained it to me. 🙂

Well, this finally shut her down and the rest of the drive into Avon was fairly uneventful. I was very worried as I didn’t have Jack’s home phone number, didn’t have my shop keys so that I could get said number, and I had never been to Jack’s apartment and didn’t know where he lived. He told me earlier in the day that she knew where he lived and could take me there… I don’t think he was counting on a third of a liter of vodka. So with this, and her earlier desire to come home with me rather than go to Jack’s place, I was starting to get a little worried.

After driving around west Avon for about 20 minutes I finally spotted Jack’s jeep and pulled into the complex where this woman proceeded to walk into the wrong apartment, scaring the bejeezus out of some poor ski bum. I figured she might just be one unit off and went to the same door in the left hand building and knocked… Luckily my hunch was right and Jack opened the door where upon I handed him her, her bags, and ran back to my car.

I’m sure he’ll want to know what was wrong tomorrow at work and I’ll be sure to point out just how much he owes me for this little trip. 😉

Well, it is officially “orange season” here in the high country. Orange season has two meanings; it’s the beginning of the hunting season and it’s also the beginning of the road work season.

The hunting season part isn’t too bad as it usually results in cheap elk and white tail being available, and elk jerky in a few weeks which is very yummy.

The road work part of the season can really ruin your day. Yesterday they had traffic backed up from east Vail all the way to the top of Vail pass in the name of paving.

Here closer to home even my little side street had bucket loaders and backhoes on it, which resulted in a 15 minute delay to get to the traffic light on highway 6. At the light I had another 3 songs on the CD worth of wait as they’re in the middle of widening highway 6 for the new off ramp to the east of here and there were some really big machinery ripping up the westbound lanes; making the busiest road in town one lane for about 5 miles. Then there is the work that is still going on for Wally World which brings traffic to a crawl again so no one hits the landscapers putting in aspen trees and rocks on the roundabout. This is followed by the repaving on Bob the Bridge in Avon which snarls traffic going to/from Beaver Creek…

I’m not one of the billionaire elite who live in Arrowhead or Beaver Creek so I’m blessed with infinitely more patience for things such as this, and it was getting on my nerves… I’m sure some time during the day one of the “Affluenza” up there drew a gun on some poor DOT worker. Seriously, you get in the way of an Audi A8 or BMW X3 when one of these fat cats is getting on the highway in Avon and you’d think you’d killed a member of their family. They’re a scourge up here that was delivered by the promise of million dollar plots of land and twenty million dollar homes…

It’s funny that most of them don’t even really live here and are nothing more than tourists who don’t stay at the lodges, don’t buy anything from the local establishments, and don’t even ski. But whatever you do, don’t piss one off because they suddenly become the most important person in the entire valley.

They’re funny to watch though as money tends to gravitate to money. Someone once figured out that only one out of 18 homes up here is occupied full time and the rest are mere status symbols… I’d call them investment properties, but no one sells them once they’ve got them simply because at your next dinner party you can brag about your “home up in Vail”. I guess that gives you enough popularity-points to be worth the money you spend keeping a second, empty, home up here. So, if Bob has a home in Vail, and you *have* to compete with Bob, you get a more expensive home in Beaver Creek and the cycle perpetuates.

It’s this thinking that has flooded the valley with these folks. There are people still living here who remember when most of Arrowhead was a sheep ranch and Edwards was a gas station… Now the going rate for floor space in Edwards is $35/sqft. and rising.

Anyone reading this will have most likely heard of Cordillera due to the whole Bryant debacle. Well, 10 years ago, Cordillera was a goat path that wound along a ridge rife with bare earth and tumbleweeds and had absolutely no value whatsoever. Now it’s the same dirt and the same weeds, but covered in “cheap” 3-5 million dollar homes. And the locals just laugh… It’s fortunate the folks who own homes up there don’t actually live there because once it snows, that goat path they call a road up there is impassible by anything less than snow cat. I wonder if the houses up there come complete with helipad…

Well, I have to take off for work and slog my way though traffic cones, folks with slow signs, and dodge earth moving machinery.

Well, it’s progress…

Wow. It was nice to sleep in.

I don’t think I started breathing till 11 am today and didn’t actually make it to a standing position till about noon. I’m just not the late-nite party animal that other folks are… Then again, having a job that requires you to get up at 7 am every morning tends to curtail ones evening pursuits.

I did some doodling whilst I ate lunch of a character portrait of an anthro Ki’Rin fem named Benten I’ve needed to do for Wolf for months now. The doodle quickly turned into a full blown sketch and in about another hour was inked on Bristol and on its way to the scanner. The transfer from pad to Bristol presented a problem… I don’t have my light box anymore. So with a little scotch tape and a sunny window I was back in business…

I quickly ran into another issue… I wanted to do this illo in color, but my Wacom turned up missing back when I moved from Connecticut to Colorado and I’ve not dropped the $500 to replace it yet. I haven’t had much need for it as I’ve not been generating all that much artwork over the last year; another thing that work will do to you.

Well, I bit the bullet and used the touchpad on my laptop with *lots* of pressure and brush size tweaking between airbrush strokes. Not something I plan to repeat.

I’m hoping Wolf will be happy with it. I’m pretty impressed for not having drawn much of anything since December and coloring it with a touchpad. This isn’t my best work by any stretch of the imagination, but considering the situation, it’s not bad.

Well, time to stick another CD full of MP3s into the player out in the dining room and see what else I can come up with today…

I just got back from a really killer show over at the Half Moon in west Vail. Roy, the drummer from Little Hercules, told me at the shop that they’d be playing tonight with Carlos Washington, the Hellafunk Allstars, and DJ Dot Com was going to be there too.

What a show.

On top of playing some really great music, the guys from Minturn pulled off a 20 minute jam session between themselves, Carlos, Hellafunk, and DJ Dot Com that was mind-boggling. Imagine two bands and a jazz trumpet master going head-to-head with the absolute latest in beat technology software and not missing a note for over 20 minutes. It was simply amazing. Just goes to show you that good musicians are open genera; a jazz horn playing with two funk bands with a computer controlled techno overtone was made to work, impromptu. Neat!

Anyways, it was neat to see so many people show up, and a lot of them even knew the words to a few songs. I really think the guys from the band might make it here soon. They’ve got air time up here in the valley and some exposure in the south, but the thing that is really propelling them forward is XM. They’re requested quite often on the “unsigned bands” channel, which is cool.

Well, I smell like I’ve been in a bar for the last 4 hours… Probably because I have. As usual I drank a lot of iced tea but did have a shot of scotch with Roy after the show. It’s not the alcohol smell that bugs me; rather it’s the smell of stale cigarettes. Time for a quick shower with emphasis on the hair… With hair like mine it takes some real work to get the cigarette smell out… Then it’s off to bed with me.

I got a call from Jeff last night at about a quarter to 11 asking if I’d like to see a movie as he’d been drinking at a bar near the theatre in Edwards and wanted some time to sober up before driving home… Or have me drive him home if 2 hours wasn’t enough time. So I caught the late-late showing of “Underworld” last night.

It’s ok. It’s a John Woo flick and, as I’d supposed earlier, it’s big on “wire shots” but lacking in “plot”. It was a fun 2 hour romp though the politics of Vampires and Werewolves though, with just enough “Romeo and Juliet” thrown in to give it some semblance of style.

The werewolf transformation scenes seemed to be painful enough, with lots of wet bone sound effects and the vampires are suitably decadent and hung up on themselves. All in all it wasn’t a bad movie as far as action flicks go.

Ultimately I wound up driving Jeff home and will both pick him up today and take him to work, and pick him up after work and take him to his car.

This is the down side to being very much an occasional drinker and really only having a liking for –good- single malt scotch. This makes me almost exclusively an iced tea drinker when “out and about” and also makes me the designated driver or person to call when the blood in your alcohol stream has reached an all time low.

Well, I have to get rolling to ensure folks I know don’t appear to be the folks they really are.

Well, Larry is off to California again laying the groundwork for another consulting job.

It’s nice that he likes to travel so much because I don’t.

This does give me free run of Château D’Isaster for a month or so which is always fun as it lets me play my music as loud as I want and take over the big glass “board room” table in the dining room for art without having to put it all away when I get up to do something else for a while. Hopefully I can get the pieces I started six months ago for Wolf and Lyon finished shortly.

I also have a pen-ink piece with Aryntha, Rai and I in it, in a ‘charlie’s angels’ sort of composition but with cameras in place of guns, not in silhouette, and with a big AT&T stile tower in the background. The sketch is pretty cool so far and I’m holding true to the heavy line weight and cell shading style popular in the 70’s…

Maybe I’ll give Aryntha a big ‘fro or something. 😉

Wow, it’s been a very busy week here. Aryntha, Rai and I have been busily documenting the historic AT&T transcontinental microwave relay route through Colorado at any chance we get. So I guess that means I have a whole week’s worth of posting to do in one big entry.

I’ve got the OMFUXS web site up and running now on server space donated to us for this and other similar endeavors. For the morbidly curious, or those with a higher than normal geek quotient, go see http://www.badpixels.com/~omfuxs.

Yesterday we all took the day off to go tour one of these sites with a fellow who owns several of them. My day yesterday started at 6am and went to 2am, and today I was off and running at 7am so I’m feeling kinda spongy right now… What better time to write in ones journal, no?

I’m happy to report that Wolf and Lyon are getting along better now. They were really falling apart at the seams there for a week or two a few weeks ago. I didn’t want to write about it all then as it was a really touchy situation, but now things seem to be getting better and I feel I can at least make a passing mention of it.

Larry is back here at the château for a few days before returning to California for a few more weeks. He’s in a pretty chipper mood considering we’ve pretty much decided to not renew the lease on the space the shop is currently in. They want to up the rent per square foot from $21 to $26 a month and we collectively think that sucks. So we’re looking at other venues right now.

One plan is to open another storefront up here, though smaller than the current 5500 sqft monster we have now, and open one or two small store fronts in a Den-burb. Larry will operate the store here while I move back down to Denver to run the operation there. This gives us an advantage of being able to shuffle the inventory around to make the best use of the demographic. Denver is much more “tech” than Vail and that should allow the computer store side of things to really take off. Conversely there isn’t much skiing or snowboarding in Denver and anyone wanting to offload gear they no longer want will do so cheaply… Send that gear up to Vail where it’s worth considerably more and you have what we like to call a business model. The inverse of that is the seasonal kids up here tend to buy a laptop or a small desktop computer for the season and dump it cheap right before flying back home… Send that gear down to Denver where it’s got an intrinsic value and, again, that’s a good thing.

The down side to this is I’m not crazy about moving back down to Denver. Perhaps I’ll secure a place in Conifer or Morrison which is a mere 30 minutes southwest, but that makes all the difference. That will also enable me to help Aryntha and Rai out of the hell-hole they live in right now…

Speaking of that; I guess it’s about a week and a half ago now, but Rai got to see a simultaneous car theft and break-in at their complex. Two 15 year olds and a 16 year old who live around there decided to boost a car from the complex and then, on the way out, they stopped to swipe a stereo out of a second car. Well, the person owning car number two caught them in the act and started raising hell so they tried to do a “gone in 60 seconds”, hit a speed bump wrong, and ended up bending the car over a curb.

The beauty here is they were all underage and after spending a few hours reading books to old people, will be right back at it again.

In other news my “stalker” seems to have finally decided that I’m not going to be interested in her… Wolf’s suggestion to tell her I’m seeing someone in Denver seems to have cooled her fire and she hasn’t been seen in over a week. *pets the wise wolf*

For those who haven’t been on the real-time end of this, what was going on was that a single mom who works over at Walmart had decided that I would be a good “catch” and was spending an inordinate amount of time in the shop just talking at me… Yes, at me.

See, I’m a busy person, and I have a lot of things I’d like to accomplish in this life, so I’m just not the world’s biggest Casanova. Finding the right person for a worthwhile and complimentary relationship takes a lot of time, effort and energy that I’m just not willing to expend right now. That and I can’t take the risk right now of opening my self up for the kind of beating I got last time…

The view from my deck this morning is ‘damp’.

I had to run down to Denver tonight to drop off some paperwork to the accountant. I got there at about 8pm, dropped off the stuff, then met up with Aryntha to have some Chinese before heading back up the mountain. I left Aryntha’s place at about 10pm…

That’s when the fun began…

I left Aryntha’s place and went down the street to top off the gas tank as gas is $0.40 cheaper in Denver than in Vail. It started to get really windy as I pulled out of the gas station and headed west on Morrison road. By the time I got to C-470 the wind was gusting hard enough to pick up golf ball sized rocks and toss them at the traffic on the highway. I got hit by one of these rocks just above the windshield on the trim and as I watched it come at me I thought for sure I’d be buying a new windshield tonight. I guess I got lucky.

Onward I went, getting onto I-70 and heading west again as 70+ mph winds threw semis around like toys. It started raining at the top of Floyd Hill and it became a full fledged deluge from Idaho Springs to Georgetown. Once past Georgetown two state cops had closed down one lane for a car that was firmly embedded in the mountain side near Silverplume. The torrential rains turned into sleet, then snow on the East side of Loveland Pass and on the west side of the Eisenhower Tunnel it was a full blown blizzard with 10 foot visibility and icy roads all the way down to Dillon.

Then on the East side of Vail Pass it got *real* foggy, followed by a boulder the size of a small car sitting in the right lane (in the fog) at mile marker 186 on the West side. Once in Vail the trip got easy and the lightning was neat to watch… It took about 2.5 hours to get home and I think I’m gonna go to bed now. 🙂

Well, as of closing tonight we will no longer be writing loans. State law says we have to have a 30 day period before the close of business where all money-lending operations have ceased. As the lease is up the end of October, it’s been decided to stop operations now.

So, for the next month or so, we’re just a curiosity shop…

We’ve been looking for store front space up here that isn’t unbelievably expensive, without much luck. The place we are in is going up to $27 a square foot now that Gart Sports, Office Depot, and Pier 1 are going in. So it’s looking like plan “A” still, which is the move everything to Denver and sell out of the warehouse for a while before starting things up again in March-April in the Littleton area.

Jack isn’t taking this very well as he refuses to move to Denver and hasn’t done much more than run this place for the last seven years. He’s not sure what he’s going to do when the doors close.

I’m kind of looking forward to moving the store as we’ll finally have a chance to make some real money. The area up here is thick with “GenNext” folks who’ll drop $1000 in a heartbeat on some new gizmo that lets them break bones on the mountain faster, but couldn’t care less about computers and stuff. “Geeks” and “X-ers” don’t mix well so there just isn’t a market up here for what I do.

Yesterday turned out to be very cool, as I had figured it would. It had all the elements for a great adventure starting as soon as the Lincoln cleared the garage…

First off, remember all those people with the RVs and motor homes I mentioned in my last installment? Well, this time they were going down the mountain at 10 MPH rather than up. I left Château D’Isaster at roughly noon and made what is normally a 90 minute trip in a barrier-breaking 3 hours! Woot!

I would probably still be somewhere near Idaho Springs if I didn’t research old telephone stuff… Odd sounding yes? Well, it’s true; see, to research the old telephone infrastructure one has to get off the relatively new highway and onto relatively old roads, side streets and fire paths. Well, when you do this you tend to discover routes that normal people wouldn’t even guess, and I used this knowledge to get to Denver relatively quick while people were having cookouts on I-70.

The trip started with my reaching Dillon at roughly 1pm… That means it took an hour to go 35 miles over Vail Pass. So from Dillon I got on Highway 6, took the back route over Loveland Pass (beautiful views BTW), back onto 6 at Georgetown down to Idaho Springs. There I took County 134 around the Idaho Springs tunnel and over the ridge to Highway 40 at Golden which leads south to Morrison. It was a great drive.

Some interesting side notes; old Highway 6 used to be the longest highway in the US until segments of it were decommissioned in 1964 and before I-70 was completed, the drive to Vail from Denver used to take about 5 hours.

Another thing I noticed this weekend was the profusion of cars flying american flags. Far, far more than normal. It makes me wonder if folks have “Labor”day confused with “Memorial”day. Probably…

Ok, so I made it to Aryntha and Rai’s place again and we promptly took off to locate some old telephone infrastructure we hadn’t been to in over seven years. We skirted the “sprawl” via C-470 and headed south on Highway 85, then south again on 105.

Highway 105 is the “magic road” for old phone stuff as the road itself was a maintenance road for the Transcontinental Cable between Colorado Springs and Denver. At a fire station on 105 one can find two old Mountain Bell era “huts” with their 1970’s CO signs still pointing to “zuni” in Denver.

In the middle of the route is an ESS5E switch center, which is quite active still. We figure most of Douglas County routes calls though the old TransCon easement to Denver based on what we’ve seen.

A little further south we found an even older amplifier station with a very old “Bell Systems” logo on it from the mid 1960’s. A very amazing find actually.

We followed the TransCon poles down into Colorado Springs before the sun went down and it became impossible to continue. After a little deliberation we decided to head back to Denver so we could all be ready for today. I have to work, Rai has to work the morning shift today and Aryntha had homework to do before classes today.

I will be assembling a web site to detail the old TransCon system in Colorado in the coming weeks. It’s really an interesting page in the history of the US which is very much overlooked.

Well, I should go fix breakfast and head for the store. Later…

It’s another one of those rare “long weekends” and here it is Monday and I’m not at work. How odd… I mean, I’m not really sure what to –do- with the down time. I got up at 7am as usual and went through my morning routine which gets me to about 8:30. I have an hour before I leave at 9:30-9:45 so I can be at the store and get it turned on, organized, and open by 10am.

So, from about 8:30 on today I’ve had this odd feeling that something is wrong…

I went down to Denver Friday evening to hang out with Aryntha and Rai for the weekend. The trip down was an adventure; I was one of about ten people going east while the rest of the world was going west. There was a line of RVs going up the mountain, in the slow lane, at about 10 MPH, all the way from the Eisenhower tunnel down to Georgetown. Seriously. The Arapahoe Basin, the area that comprises this area, was shrouded in a blue haze of pollution well past Georgetown on the downhill side.

They were probably all going “camping” with their color TVs, hot water heaters, and microwaves.

I got down to Aryntha and Rai’s place at about 9pm. Cracker, from the muck, was in town and stopped in to shack up for the night. So Arythna and I spent the evening in his room, fiddling with a 2kva pure sine UPS I managed to score a while back while Rai was at work.

Rai works at a coffee shop in southwest Denver and her hours are abysmal. During the weekends she usually works closing and doesn’t get out till midnight.

I’m not the vampire I used to be and Rai was exhausted so we called it a night and with Cracker on the couch I trundled off to get a room for the night…

Big mistake.

It’s a holiday and every hotel room in town it seemed was taken. I eventually found a room at a Quality Suites; which at $110 a night it was obvious why they had rooms.

Saturday, after dropping Rai off at work and sending Cracker off with Raven to the dump, Aryntha and I headed down town-ish to check out the ARC, Savers and VA second hand stores. It’s amazing what one can find, computer wise, at these places for cheap. We did find a 3com “near online” SCSI storage controller at the first place we went, but otherwise the stores looked like they’d already been hit by another group of geeks.

So, we went towards Golden to check out the microwave relay on the north table mesa there. We drove by my parent’s old house on East Avenue while we were there… The place is identical right down to the tower in the back yard and the POP Box that was put in for my BBS stuff when I was in High School.

We were about to head down highway 93 to scope out the autovon huts that litter the route due to Rocky Flats being out there when Otto called. So we headed down 93 with two purposes; to check out autovon and the GWEN system at Rocky Flats, and to get to Boulder to ‘hang’ with Otto at his apartment on the CU campus.

Got to his place at about 5pm and hung out while we waited for Korn to show up. Once everyone was there we sat around discussing human psychology and how it is affected by causality for a few hours before deciding to take a hike, as a group, down to the Pearl Street Mall.

So, with Otto and Bethany with their son Aldus in tow, Keyler, Korn, Aryntha, a fellow they knew but I just met, and I, we formed a “gang” and marched on Pearl Street. The whole way we were still on the causality kick and, even for a college town, we got odd stares. One of the highlights was when we, a group of folks in “nail bunny” or apple t-shirts, trenchcoats, and combat boots got approached by a fellow who wanted to show off his poetry-prowess… Talk about not choosing your audience…

He started off with “Name a poet, any poet” so Bethany did and, to his credit, he did know a few verses. Then Bethany rounded on him and, in good gothic form, quoted something *very* obscure from someone probably dead for a few hundred years, with perfect meter. So this fellow tried to up the ante and was smacked down by the new guy who did some Dr. Seuss in 180bpm with perfect enunciation and inflection the whole time… Poor guy; he had one talent and was victimized by us right there in front of god and everyone.

After that we decided to lay siege to a pizza place on the mall where Bethany got jalapeno juice in her eye. This resulted in the discussion of the perception of pain the whole way back to Otto’s place.

When we got back it was time for Aryntha and me to head back to Denver so he could pick up Rai from work. We did so then watched the Wall for a while before I decided to head back up the mountain for the night. I got home at 4am and spent Sunday doing laundry and cleaning up the house.

I’m getting ready to head back down the mountain here in a bit to spend the rest of the day with Aryntha and Rai. Who knows what we’ll do, but it’ll be an adventure… It always is.